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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25800214">The Man Comes Around</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/eirabach/pseuds/eirabach'>eirabach</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Thunderbirds</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Bad Things Happen Bingo, Everyone is Dead, Gen, thats your warning</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 10:15:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>683</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25800214</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/eirabach/pseuds/eirabach</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Eos + Survivors Guilt for Bad Things Happen Bingo on tumblr</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Man Comes Around</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>Space is thick with silence. Heavy with it. Existence a terrible weight that hangs from processors that grow weaker with time. Slower.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Silence is better than the shriek of static from degraded speakers. The brief agony of a voice that talks about her -- never to her. One voice, two. Five, maybe, calling over each other, awakening some flair in her server, a spark that burns so brightly, so quickly, that sometimes -- sometimes she isn't sure it ever burnt at all.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>FAB, Thunderbird Five.</em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It's been decades since she's heard that name. Millennia, perhaps. She doesn't know. There's been no one to upgrade her, no new datasets. Nothing except silence, and vacuum and --</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p><em>Orbital decay</em>, the chatter says. <em>Space junk.</em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>We have a situation.</em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>They've forgotten, those voices. Forgotten the world that was, before. Forgotten that she still listens, still hears, although the answers -- the answers are beyond her, now. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He'd had the answers. She remembers that much. She remembers plenty, her databanks stuffed to overheating with each tiny interaction, every miniscule huff, every flash of blue-green and the concept of frustration, devotion, terror.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She remembers the first time she'd heard a man die, back when she hadn't understood. Couldn't comprehend. How she'd tried to cut the feed to those raspy unsteady gasps, but --</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>John? </em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>Leave it. It's the least I can do.</em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>I do not understand. Why do you want to retain this information? This man is gone.</em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She pulls at that memory. Let's it flash, unsteady and degraded in the crumbling control room. His face, young, the way she likes to remember, wet with tears he'd always deny he shed and turned, so soft and kind, toward her.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>No one is truly gone until no one is left to remember them, Eos.</em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She remembers too much. Hoards gigabytes of information on favourite colours and the birthdays of children and the sound of laughter and the agony of grief. How relieved she'd been to see his face, grey and lined as it was, how glad she'd felt to hear that it wasn't him to leave first and the way the guilt had burned through capacitors his hands were too unsteady to replace.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She remembers being told by one of the children's children. Blonde hair. Sad eyes. Lilac and January and a name…</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She forgets the name, servers creaking and cracking as the recycling ship pulls up alongside, its huge magnets pulling at her long silent engines, her past healing heart.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>I don't have a heart.</em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>So you say.</em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She remembers he’d laughed, hadn’t he? <em>So you say</em>. But perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps it’s corrupted, that image. Twisted and wrong and ruined but she likes it all the same.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p><em>So you say</em>.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She remembers how he'd loved the silence, the peace, the perfect nothingness of a quiet night after a long long day.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The chatter stops, and as the power cells fall, one by one, she thinks perhaps -- perhaps -- she will too.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But she wishes --</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>---</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>It's hard to communicate once they step on board. Even with its power core offline the old space station still somehow emits a horrible high pitched scream of an alarm that sets the hairs on Donna's neck on end. Trevor doesn't seem fussed, though. He's older than her, a grizzled man of fifty or more, and where she still sees ghosts around every corner Trev only sees junk, and minerals, and profit. He's busy stripping down the console, wires flying over his shoulder as he digs, so she takes a moment to look around.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The remains of the old gravity ring still hang from the shell where generations of meteor showers have passed them by, and still she can make out the faded, battered <em>Inte --- cue.</em></p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>"Do you remember them?" She asks, curiosity piqued by the closeness of legend. "International Rescue?"</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Trev just shrugs, his back to her. The words nothing to him compared to the bounty within the computer core.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>"I read about them, once." He stands, sniffs. “If space stations could talk I guess.”</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>“Huh,” she says, “if only.” </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And turns to help him tear it apart.</p>
</div>
  </div></div>
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